i want to write about two beautiful films i just saw. they are, among other things, about children, a subject that lends itself to sentimentalism. i generally avoid films about kids, and i was tempted to avoid these too, had they not been by directors i like very much. one is deepa mehta’s water, the other is hirokazu koreeda nobody knows (koreeda made the sublime afterlife). i think that, for the most part, the directors do a good job at staying away from sentimentalism. nobody knows is hardly sentimental at all, though the beautiful face of the protagonist, young Yûya Yagira (who won best actor at cannes), is tremendously captivating and sweet. deepa mehta’s young protagonist is not a “cute” child (i at least didn’t find her so), but the film does get a bit sentimental at points. i suspect this may be due to the genre, i.e. that fact that water is an indian film that is certainly indebted to bollywood esthetics. since i know absolutely nothing about bollywood, whose beauty i don’t quite get (sorrysorrysorry), i will leave it at this, hoping someone can fill in this specific connection for me.
water, now in theatres in miami, is the third in deepa mehta elemental trilogy (the first two are fire and earth). it starts with a placid scene of a boat on the mighty gange. in the boat is the body of a mature man and a young child, his bride. chuyia, now a widow, is soon taken to a widows’ ashram where her parents, following law and custom, abandon her to the “care” of a greedy, selfish housemother and a number of other widows, mostly middle-aged or elderly. what should be a hearbreaking beginning is in fact relatively joyous. mehta has a talent for representing tragedy and atrocity through deeply sensual and occasionally humorous, light-hearted, filmmaking. the beginning scenes are drenched in color (i really wanted to avoid this cliche), and color remains a persistent theme throughout the film. the film is a delight, though, for all the senses, in particular, i found, touch: it contains a strong tactile feel, elicited by the characters’ close connection to the elements: they are often shown dealing with water — bathing in it, gathering it for religious rituals, washing garments in it, or soaking it up in the rain. these scenes feel cleansing, ancient, and joyous. mehta gives emphasis, too, to the slapping of bare feet on very old stones — the noise, the feel, is delicious.
another way in which mehta addresses touch is by having multiple close-ups of the bodies, some old and creased, of the colony’s widows. apart from the matron, all the widows are skinny and all, as the costume apparently dictates, have large portions of their arms and back exposed. mehta dwells lovingly on the worn faces of these women, on their sunken eyes, their skin. there is a fair amount of touching that goes on among the women themselves, either through mutual care, or through play (as in the “carnival” — sorry arnab) scene, when the women smear bright dyes on each other’s bodies. the presence of chuyia brings out the tenderness these women have for each other. while some seem to find her irrepressible liveliness annoying, they clearly love her, and she snuggles up to one or the other with great ease.
all this sensuality points to mehta’s attention to the saving graces of daily exchanges, to what makes one carry on in the face of pain, exclusion, humiliation, sadness. even though water is an undeniably sad film, you emerge from it with a sense of fulfillment, your senses replenished, a sweet taste on your mouth, the details of your life affirmed in their redemptive validity. and the women in the widows’ colony are all gorgeous, whether toothless and bent or young and pretty. mehta instills the colony with a sense of peaceful resignation that borders on contentment. the women’s love towards each other turns this place of exclusion into a place of family.
(i’m not commenting on the strong political content of this film, because i feel that, without much knowledge of the esthetic context of this film, i would only state the trivial. someone else want to chime in? get a glimpse at fundamentalist reactions that seriously disrpted the filming).
nobody knows is a much sparser film, grittier, more aggressively realistic. this may be partly due to the fact that, unlike water, which is set in 1938, nobody knows is set in contemporary tokyo. the film is about four siblings who, left alone by a not-quite-together mother (the actress who portrays the mother gives a truly remarkable performance), need to fend for themselves with very little money. add to this that only one of them, the older boy akira, is allowed out of the house, because the neighbors mustn’t know that more than one child lives in the apartment. while akira roams all over town to buy groceries, and, later, to find money and food for his siblings, the other children spend long hot days in the house, often sleeping (there are countless shots of the sleeping children), sometimes whiling away the time by playing quietly, washing clothes, and watching tv. as their money runs out and their situation becomes desperate, akira becomes the hero of the film, keeping the family together with an earnestness and determation that belie his young age.
this is another film about the kindness of strangers, the will to survive, and the bond that allows people to survive together. as in water, there are moments of sheer joy in nobody knows, all in connection with when the children decide to throw caution to the wind and behave like children. there are also moments of incredibly sadness.
this is a gorgeous and deeply lyrical film. koreeda likes to dwell on the little gestures the children engage in: there are long shots of them eating soup, bathing, writing, playing little games alone, sleeping. life carries on, little by little, and if you stick it out maybe it’ll turn out okay.
i was struck by how many shots there are of the children’s hands and feet. akira’s dirty sneakers get a lot of attention. it’s as if koreeda were exploring their bodies for clues of their inner feelings beyond what traspires from their faces. i found these shots really effective. akira’s shoes stamping the pavement of the large city he roams in a quest for his and his siblings’ survival speak about abandoned and forlorn childhood in the same way as the shoes of little children in accident scenes convey a sadness that is almost unbearable.
edit to remove a pointless, unfair comment. if i watch the movie i will add my own response.
what can i say, arnab, i really liked water. my cat parsley liked it too.
care to link to some of the above-mentioned trashings? the reviews in the american media are glorious.
whoops, i just removed my comment about water. most of the negative commentary i’ve come across has to do with her treatment of the film’s major theme–all i wanted to say was that it isn’t simply hindu fundamentalists who’ve objected to that part of it. the discrepancy between american reviews and the opinions of most indians i know who’ve seen it is interesting, however.
I am a big fan of Nobody Knows. Gio, have you seen the anime classic Grave of the Fireflies? Koreeda’s film seem to borrow a lot from that film (set during the waning days of WWII), or at least his film (which is partially based on a true story) seems to make some interesting narrative connections to this earlier work. If one wants to read any socio-cultural meanings into both films, then the idea of childhood as a trope central to national identity construction becomes an intriguing avenue of discussion (and, if so, I would point back to Ozu’s 1959 film Good Morning). I am also interested in the way Koreeda’s film “quotes” Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, particularly the shot of Akira running and running and running toward the end of the film. There’s an argument in here somewhere, but I can’t get my act together enough to put the pieces together.
thanks for the tip about grave of the fireflies, jeff. the recommendations are coming thick and fast on this blog! if you can say more about nobody knows, which i had a little trouble writing about, i’d like to read it.
arnab, silly as your comment was (my original reply was a bit more snarly), what is unfair is that you should be the only one able to delete and edit your silly comments (i’m sure reynolds, for one, would be very happy to have that possibility). so i think you should live by your own rules and leave your silly comments up like everyone else.
Gio, at least on my computer, if I generate the intial posting, I can edit anyone’s contribution. For example, if your computer looks like mine there should be an “edit this” hyperlink beside every post no matter who wrote it. That’s how Reynolds was able to out my poopyheadedness (and it was also how I zinged him about six weeks ago concerning a misspelling of Manohla Dargis’s name that he felt the need to abuse). Given his eminence and his dictatorial nature, Arnab has been downright altruistic when it comes to blogosphere decorum. I heart arnab.
jeff, even though *we* can edit comments only following a post we started, arnab can edit anything he wants. he’s at a different “level.” altruism is not something arnab is often been accused of, and i think he might take your slur badly. i suggest you take it back. anyway, he’s hoping for a new version of wordpress that will take away from us the possibility to edit comments even in the threads we ourselves start. he perceives this as an unbearable clinch in his armor. (is this the right idyom? luckily, i can edit *this* comment!).
gio, even though i enjoy when you get self-righteous about things you don’t understand, the undramatic truth is that we’re all able to edit our own comments for upto 15 minutes after they’re made. i edited mine 5 minutes after i made it and while you were posting your follow-up.
when i log in with the blog admin account i can edit and delete anything but as far as possible i limit myself to the same tools and capabilities that everyone else has (except to split topics etc.).
I want more editing. Everyone should be able to edit everyone else, all the time. Then it’d be like Burroughs, lots of word snipping and replacing and in ten years this blog’ll be canonized as revolutionary. I mommadog face to the bananapatch.
But to get back on topic: I’ve gotta check out Nobody–and remind myself what Jeff said a while back. (Or did he just tell me about it? I could swear he posted something brief.) In fact, I’d push Jeff to open up here on the subject of kids/children and film, about which he knows a boatload, extending Gio’s original post.
My favorite kid film–i.e., film focalized on a kid’s point of view, not just about or empathizing with kids–is a toss-up between George Washington and Crooklyn. G.W. is surreal, so it can be tempting to read it as avant-garde… but watching its blurred sense of reality I’m struck by how much it reminds me of the buzz and confusion of being 10, 11, 12. (38 is a whole different kind of buzz and confusion, for another post.)
Crooklyn is more conventional, yet the little girl at the center of the family drama/comedy is a wonder.
But, again–Jeff has a number of great tips and even more good ideas here. And I’m not just sucking up to the poophead; he just knows his way around visions of childhood.
visions of childhood dance like sugar plums in my head
i’m glad, arnab, that you finally realize the superiority of italy’s game!
don’t make me take your edit function away completely.
Since the soccer postings pop up everywhere, like weeds, this may as well go here. Nice little essay.
the socio-political content of nobody knows raises to the surface when a nice grocery clerk asks akira why he doesn’t go to the police, and akira says that, in state custody, he and his siblings would not be able to stay together, and that it had happened in the past and been terrible. that resonated with me a lot. i hear stories of foster care all the time (a lot more than i care to — how do we recoil from horror!), and it all seems horribly dysfunctional and heartless. why aren’t we all up in arms about child services? why isn’t this tragedy important enough to make or break elections?
maybe japan has a much more effective and humane system to take care of abused or abandoned children, and it does seem difficult for any system to keep four kids together, but i think akira’s comment talks in general to our world’s great neglect of children, who, in spite of what we are fond of proclaiming over and over in our public speech, we seem to consider insignificant and disposable.